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<\/a><\/div>\nAfter New York legalized gay marriage Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler posted the following message to twitter<\/a> (h\/t Daylight Atheism<\/a>):<\/p>\n Now, fully 1 in 9 Americans will live in a state with legalized same-sex marriage. Our mission field is getting more complicated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Adam of Daylight Atheism offered his own gloss on this pronouncement, I\u2019ve got a different hypothesis that requires some feedback by any opposed-to-gay marriage readers. First off, here\u2019s what Adam wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n My wife and I discussed this, and I can only come up with one explanation that seems reasonable: Mohler is against same-sex marriage because he wants society to discriminate against non-Christians, thereby making conversion to Christianity a more attractive offer. If all people have equal rights, then Christianity will be forced to rely on its own persuasive power to make converts, rather than holding out unique privileges that are only available to Christians \u2013 and that\u2019s a competition he fears!<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not hard to see why. If proselytizers like Mohler seek to convince gay people that their sexual orientation is sinful, wrong and must be changed, they\u2019ll have a much harder time making the case to people in a happy, stable, committed relationship with all the benefits offered by the state to opposite-sex couples. They\u2019d prefer that GLBT people be a downtrodden and oppressed minority, punished and scorned by the state, unprotected against discrimination in jobs or housing, shut out from all the legal benefits society has to offer. They don\u2019t want to compete on a level playing field, but one that\u2019s tilted in their favor; they want people who won\u2019t convert to suffer for their defiance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think there\u2019s a simpler explanation. When gay marriage is legal, the Christian contention that it will destroy marriage, harm children, and generally blight human existence becomes testable<\/em>. It\u2019s easier to muster opposition against a hypothetical threat, and the more common gay marriage is, the easier it will be for individual Christians to draw their own conclusions. After all, that\u2019s what happened when gay people came out of the closet.<\/p>\n Christians certainly don\u2019t want any more David Frums (the conservative pundit who announced this week that after seeing gay marriage in practice, he had no data to support his previous opposition to gay marriage<\/a>). This kind of reversal undermines Chesterton\u2019s definition of the church as a \u201ctruth-telling thing<\/a>\u201d and could undermine confidence in other counter-cultural church teachings.<\/p>\n So I want to hear from all of you about what data<\/em> you expect.<\/strong> Tell me how you\u2019ll make your beliefs pay rent<\/a>. One caveat: I don\u2019t want citations for research that\u2019s been conducted. That\u2019s going to derail everyone into methodological nitpicking. I want open ended brainstorming, not problems with anchoring effects<\/a> and privileging the hypothesis<\/a>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also not going to be a methodology stickler right this second, so let\u2019s not get bogged down in the problems of how we would run data collection or deal with confounding factors in this first pass. There\u2019s time for that after<\/em> we know what variables we\u2019re interested in. If you want to start looking at possible research protocols, my hunch is that a difference-in-difference model<\/a>. would be a good place to start.<\/p>\n And, last caveat: It\u2019s fair for Christians to offer criteria that progressives don\u2019t recognize as bad outcomes (later marriage age, more cohabitation, etc). We can spend time later arguing about their ramifications. For right now, I just want people to put their cards on the table about what they\u2019re afraid of. It\u2019s a given there will be a lot of disagreement about what an adverse outcome is, since Christians would probably put \u201cleaving the church\u201d on the list Atheists are also encouraged to comment about what they think would<\/em> represent a poor prognosis for marriage.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll start by throwing out two trends off the top of my head that I would find disturbing:<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s hear what you\u2019ve got. Comments are open for spitballing, and if anyone wants to offer a longer or more detailed proposal, talk to me about a guest post.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n\n